Frank Stella, in the Heart of Manhattan

FRANK STELLA, IN THE HEART OF MANHATTAN

n the occasion of his exhibition at the Whitney Museum, Frank Stella wel- comed us into his studio in the West Village, the district where he has lived since 1967. In this space that also Oserves as his study and library, where he keeps a few works and presents his models, the artist born in 1936 retraces the golden age of American painting and his ties with Europe.

Interview by Marie Maertens

Die Fahne hoch! (1959) Frank Stella

At the moment your work is on show at the Willem Sandber, Franz Meyer or Werner Schma- Whitney Museum in New York, a city where lenbach very quickly wanted to show them. Some the MOMA already held a retrospective on will say with the help of the CIA, or at least, with you in 1986. Is it interesting for you to redis- government support for these initiatives, but the cover works that have been held for years by result was that this art circulated widely. At the private collectors? same time, in New York, we saw French painting It’s true that every time, the pieces come from by Vieira da Silva, Zao Wou-Ki or other members different places, and here the Whitney called on of the School of Paris who were shown abun- numerous American collectors before I added dantly. some pieces from my own collection. But what I tend to think about more is what institutions So in the 1960s, did you want to go against would call a retrospective, namely at the MOMA, Jackson Pollock and counter Abstract Expres- where it was more a matter of a selection from sionism as certain critics wrote? about fifteen years of work… But the truth is This is indeed what can sometimes be read, but many people, including new generations, have the idea was for my painting to be simple and not seen the other exhibitions, so in fact we minimalistic. I wanted it to cover the whole of sometimes need to go right back to the begin- the canvas in the manner of “pictorial painting”, ning… so it’s too restrictive to declare: “It’s not like Pol- lock!” Incidentally, it would have been difficult to On that note, to place your work in a histo- paint like him or Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko rical perspective, if we take Black Paintings, or even Robert Motherwell… There was great produced in 1959, had you heard of painter variety in the New York School, that Clyfford Still Pierre Soulages at the time? was also part of, and my painting was included In fact I knew him because at Princeton Univer- without it being in reaction against anything in sity where I studied, there was already a debate particular. The idea was just to be as good as on who, Pierre Soulages or Franz Kline, was the possible. first... But to stay on the topic of French artists, I was less familiar with the work of François Mo- You also opened the door to Minimal Art. rellet, that I discovered when I worked on ideas Were you conscious of this? on diagrams even if this was different from his It wasn’t really thought out because at the same own research. But at that time, everyone wanted time, there was a second generation of Abstract to be American! Because we were in the best Expressionists, with artists such as Alfred Leslie period of great US post-war painting, beginning and Michael Goldberg then Kenneth Noland, in 1935 when European artists arrived here. This Morris Louis or Helen Frankenthaler and finally, period incidentally was a great challenge for my at the top, Pop Art. So at the start of the 1960s, compatriots who struggled mentally against this four or five movements – if you want to call them omnipresent painting that was viewed in a very like that – mingled, but no one really worried concentrated manner through Pablo Picasso, about it. We were doing what we thought we Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Kasimir had to do, and appreciated what the other artists Malevitch or Vassily Kandinsky… The level was were doing. History hadn’t yet given its affirma- such that it was discouraging, but these visual ar- The Fountain (1992) tion, even if God knows so many things happe- Frank Stella tists tried, not to go beyond as it was necessary ned because we were all in New York and we saw to try to not look like copycats or imitators, but Courtesy of Whitney Museum of exhibitions every day! In our eyes, Pop Art was to see what they had to say by themselves. Later, American Art as good as Minimal Art, even if everyone had his American painting seemed to generally make a Photo Steven Sloman own favourites in the previous generation. In my © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists great impression, and European curators like Rights Society (ARS) case, I really admired Hans Hofmann.

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It was also in 1961 that you came up with this redjang (2009) phrase, that’s become a famous saying: “What Frank Stella you see is what you see”… Courtesy of Whitney Museum of Right… If you’re polite, you can say that that’s di- American Art plomatic, and if you’re not, you can also judge © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists that it’s a bit simplistic… But what I probably Rights Society (ARS) wanted to say then was that I wasn’t responsible for what the public saw. When I presented a painting, I had no idea of what someone else would end up seeing in it…

Was this a continuation of Marcel Duchamp’s ideas on the role of the viewer who also constructs the work? It’s true, Marcel Duchamp’s shadow hovered over New York, but he wasn’t the only one because the integration of European artists was relatively ho- mogenous. It’s difficult to understand the enor- mous impact of the war and even of the years preceding it on American painting. Because before, it was… how can I put this without get- And then let’s not forget that the MOMA pre- ting shot… not provincial, but much lesser than sented great painting from the start of the 20th after the arrival of Europeans that made artists century very early on, far before European mu- excited and ambitious. After, everyone sparked a seums. wonderful energy! As far as I was concerned, I’d The Whiteness of the Whale (IRS-1, always admired Bauhaus, and already at school, 2X) (1987) You have on your desk a book on Rome, a city Frank Stella the programme I was studying was infused with where you went in residence at the American Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann which brought Courtesy of Whitney Museum of Academy, in 1982, and you namely studied us, still from Europe, the influence of geometry American Art the painting of Caravaggio. Did this allow you © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists on the one hand, and pictorialism on the other. Rights Society (ARS) to continue your research on the construction of depth? I don’t think that this residence changed my work but it brought a certain combination of confi- dence and expertise. It was difficult for me to understand art of the past, in the same way as it is for everyone I think, but if you’ve already been working for 20 years, you can ask yourself: what’s the difference between my paintings, whether good or bad, and those from before? It’s a bit brutal, but at a certain moment you realise that whatever the quality of the admired works, their basic ac- tivity was to have been produced. That is to say, an artist did a painting of something, whatever the idea that he had or whatever was going on in society, in his experience or his education… In the end, he produced a work and some, like Ca- ravaggio, did it with brio! But outside of the rea- lism on his canvases, it’s very interesting that the protagonists in his paintings convey the feeling of projecting themselves outside of the frame, into the spectator’s space. He was one of the first to do what I’ve continued, more literally, with my sculptures.

Do you still look at old painting? Like these many photocopies on your desk suggest… Yes, here you’ve got Rogier van der Weyden, who was also one of the first to use “shaped canvas”, long before me… As I still like experimenting, for six years I’ve been working on a new type of sculpture, in thermoplastic polymer. I appreciate these new materials that are flexible and that allow me to be very precise, but the problem is that they’re not at all resistant. While on a small scale I can make anything, I can’t always enlarge them the way I’d like to.

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So do you mainly interrogate your work from Empress of India (1965) from the fact that abstraction can be relaxed, a formal standpoint? Before you used to say Frank Stella less strict, be dressed with a sort of social sen- that you didn’t want painting to be the repre- timent that could seem more spontaneous. In © MoMA/Licensed by SCALA / sentation of an illusion but that it was just an Art Resource, NY this sense I’ve also worked on maps of Eastern object … cities for the Protractor Series. These circular At first, painting for me was just lines, geome- maps are initially as abstract as a painting, but try, materiality and surface. But later, I imagined perhaps they trigger more associations. In the that the shapes were accompanied by a sort Harran II (1967) way that generally, things always remind of Frank Stella of narrative impulse that animated them and other things and make you think of multiple re- made them somehow run, and I named some Courtesy of Whitney Museum of ferences… maps with a few stories, namely in the Moby American Art © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists Dick series. This wasn’t illustration, but came Rights Society (ARS)

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